Fireball captured on camera over Tenerife, Canary Islands

Meteorite captured on camera by Slovakian observatory in the Canaries

    

A spectacular image was captured on camera by the AMOS project near Los Cristianos in Tenerife at 23.17 on Tuesday when a meteor illuminated the sky as it hurtled towards Earth.

The meteor, which was first spotted when it was still 83 kilometres away from the planet, disintegrated 25.2 kilometres from the Earth's surface, and was snapped by the cameras of the AMOS project in the observatory of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias Teide y Roque de los Muchachos.

The AMOS (All-Sky Meteor Orbit System) project has been up and running for only two months, and every night scans the sky in search of meteors using two detectors located 140 kilometres apart in Tenerife and La Palma. These devices can calculate the exact orbits and trajectories of the bodies they detect.

The technology was developed by the Astronomical and Geophysical Observatory of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics at the Comenius University in Slovakia, and won a gold medal at the INVENTO 2013 exhibition. Its intended use is for improving meteor and meteorite detection and prediction systems, and in future it is planned to install similar equipment in Chile in order to allow the southern skies to be monitored as well.